Always find one another
by liliumweiss
Summary: Little ficlet inspired by episode 1x09 "True North". Involves Captain Swan Cobra Rook all connected via DNA. Don't like, don't read.


In Storybrooke, a month after Henry showed up on her doorstep in Boston, Emma Swan searches for Tilly Liddell's father. Father who, apparently, is no one else than her co-worker, detective James Rogers, detective she does not have a crush on, especially not after Graham's death. Everyone leaves.

But Tilly, Tilly deserves to have a loving father in her life, someone who will take care of her after living in an abandoned house all her short life. She's only ten, for god's sake, she should just know love, not loneliness. Emma can see so much of herself in the blue-eyed girl, and she knows that if Tilly tilted her head, Emma could see her irises change and become her own.

It takes Rogers a lot of time to come around, Emma discovering he'd slept with Tilly's mother just once and that she'd never told him about the baby. He's angry with himself, but Emma doesn't blame him, not until he decides he can't take care of a little girl, not even when she shows him the compass Alice held on to all her life, a compass Emma feels like she's seen herself before. It's impossible, she _hasn't_. Yet…

Yet she finds herself averting her eyes from a crying Henry, his "you don't know what you're doing" clear even if there's a lump in his throat that prevents him from telling her the truth, a truth he knows and hasn't told her yet because it's too big, one that has forced him to rip the pages from the book and hide them because, if she knew, Emma would probably run away.

Emma and Tilly nmmake it to the town line: there's what seems a bloody colony of rabbits on the street and Emma swerves to avoid them, ending up off the road.

They get out with just a few scratches, but still need to get a complete check-up at the hospital. Emma couldn't live with herself if something happened to Tilly, she feels it in her chest.

It's then, when Emma and Tilly are both eating a lollipop each, matching band-aids on their foreheads and a few more on Tilly's knees, that Rogers shows up with, ironically enough, a stuffed rabbit in his good hand, worried both for Emma and his daughter.

Emma leaves them be, not before looking at how they instantly connect, the scene making her cry with joy and her heart seems to grow three sizes bigger. There's also something else swirling inside her, not exactly jealousy, or envy, just something else she cannot explain.

With time, Henry and Tilly's complicity increases, they are good for one another, rapidly becoming best friends but sometimes bickering like siblings. The thought makes Emma chuckle and her heart flutters at the thought. She knows it can't be, not now, not when her focus must solely be on Henry, but it doesn't stop her from going on full mother mode when it comes to Tilly.

It's her encounter with Jefferson that turns the tables. The man is _mad_, but his pain is so real, she can feel it herself, because being separated from a child who doesn't remember you, being forced to see them every day and never being more than someone passing by could tear her heart apart, too. But it's when he refers to her "children" that something stirs inside her, something that seems much like doubt.

Henry told her he too was born in the Enchanted Forest ten years ago, but that's not what Emma remembers: Emma clearly remembers stealing the Bug, stealing silly things in convenience stores with Neal, having bad sex in the backseat of the Bug with him, ending up in jail because of him, and she remembers giving birth to Henry and never holding him once because at seventeen she couldn't be a mother. But no matter how much safe and real those memories feel, Emma is beginning to feel them as not real. It's absurd, and it's impossible, so she just ignores the nagging voice inside her head.

She ignores it, and ignores her growing affection for Rogers and the way he makes her heart fly, until Henry eats the apple turnover Regina baked for her, until she faces the woman in question and asks her if everything Henry thought was true truly is, and when the brunette tells her it is, Emma sees red, so red she even manages to fight a fucking _dragon_ with what Gold tells her is her own father's sword.

It doesn't matter how much Rogers protests, Emma doesn't let him come with her, making him promise to stay close to Henry because she _trusts_ him. She doesn't kiss him, no matter how much she wants to, but she doesn't, because she's never been one for tearful goodbyes, and she will see him again, this she promises to herself.

It's when she thinks she's lost Henry, when her heart _breaks_ in her chest, that she finally says the words she feared to tell him, words used to express a sentiment she's felt for him since the moment he showed up at her apartment. And it's when she kisses his pale and slightly too cold forehead that Emma _remembers_.

She remembers balls, adventures, princes and princesses, _pirates_, True Love, a beanstalk and a golden compass she needed to find and had asked a certain fearsome Captain to help her retrieve because a curse would soon come, being she sixteen and he not much older than her – if you don't count years spent on an island out of time and space – neither of them had predicted they would fall in love along the way, being so young yet in love and oh so ready for her pregnancy to be over, then welcoming two healthy babies, a boy with hair as dark as his father's and a girl with her mother's golden locks. Emma remembers, remembers a life that is actually hers, not made up of false memories.

«Mama!»

It's her daughter's cry for her that makes her turn, her sweet pirate princess, her _Alice_ colliding full speed against her, hugging her so tight Emma doesn't even complain because they're together once again.

And then there's Killian, her pirate, her _husband_, the person who's always stuck with her even with his cursed persona, falling in love with her despite his cursed past and who has made _Emma_ fall in love with himself even when her walls were as high as skyscrapers.

«Killian,» she sobs, seated on the hospital bed with Henry leaning against her and Alice sitting on her lap, tears in their eyes as the man takes them in, disbelief clear in his eyes.

«Emma,» he breathes before striding towards them and kissing Emma soundly like he's not done in little more than a year, showering then his son's face with kisses, making up for the time they were cursed, Henry's giggles music to his ears. He hugs his beloved Starfish, peppering her cheeks with kisses, too.

They hug and kiss, and hug some more, knowing and not much caring about the evil witch they'll need to face soon. They will, they will also win, they just _know_ it, just how they know that they are a family, and they will always find each other.


End file.
